About

Discover Archer

Founded by three bold and visionary women, The Archer School for Girls was always intended to be an innovative school, a place where every programmatic decision is based on the current research about how girls learn, develop, and thrive.

Collaborative Learning Spaces

A 21st-century education has, at its core, the concept of collaboration where students transfer and apply content and skills from multiple subject areas in order to design, create, and problem solve. Schools are full of artificial divides between subjects, grade levels, and the very spaces in which we gather to learn. Thus designing The Saban IDEAlab and the MediaSpace were speculative endeavors, requiring us as educators and architects to think fundamentally as futurists.

Girls are natural collaborators and they care about beauty, so the impulse to create learning spaces that would enable teachers and students to collaborate across disciplines in an environment that ignited their imaginations was natural for Archer.

MediaSpace

The 21st-century learning environment allows students to work collaboratively and independently in a real-world, professional workspace. The space includes:

12 editing bays fully-equipped with industry standard software

a sound booth for vocal recording

a soundproof lighting studio equipped with an infinity wall and mechanical backdrops including a green screen

The space officially opened in January with a ribbon cutting ceremony attended by eight-time Academy Award®-nominated producer, president of Lucasfilm, and Archer Board member Kathy Kennedy, five-time Academy Award®-nominated director and producer, sole principal of The Kennedy/Marshall Company, and Archer Board member Frank Marshall, music producer and four-time Songwriter of the Year winner from The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publisher’s Pop Awards songwriter Martin Sandberg, Archer's Head of School Elizabeth English, and Archer Board member Lauren Fite and her husband, Austin.

The Saban IDEAlab serves as the physical hub of Archer’s Integrated Design & Engineering Arts (IDEA) program, as well as a space for cross-curricular collaboration in all subject matters. Inspired by new research into the value of hands-on technology and makerspaces in education, the IDEAlab program further elevates Archer’s leadership in progressive learning and encourages girls to discover their passions, whether directly in STEM fields or through applying technology within other disciplines.

The facility is equipped with the latest digital prototyping tools including a 3-D printer, laser cutter, gantry mill, and vinyl cutter as well as a full complement of shop and hand tools to support student projects in mechanical design, robotics, computer programming, discrete electronics, prototype building, and more.